Apple Finally Starts to Sell Its All-New Mac Pro This Week.

Apple has announced the all-new Mac Pro will be available to order starting Thursday, December 19. Redesigned from the inside out, the all-new Mac Pro features the latest Intel Xeon processors, dual workstation-class GPUs, PCIe-based flash storage and ultra-fast ECC memory. Unfortunately, ultimate speeds come at ultimate price that starts at $2999. Unfortunately, ultimate speeds come at ultimate price that starts at $2999.

The new Apple workstation has been anticipated by professionals around the world who use Macs for their work. While desktops nowadays cease to be the main PCs for a lot of people, they continue to provide unbeatable performance for the most demanding applications. Apple has historically rarely updated its Mac Pro desktops and has almost never updated them this radically as in the case of the new system. Given than the previous-generation Mac Pro based on Nehalem micro-architecture faced a number of minor upgrades during its lifecycle (which started back in 2009), it is highly likely that the initial demand for the new generation workstation will be high.

The new Apple Mac Pro features 4-core, 6-core, 8-core or 12-core Intel Xeon processors running at Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9GHz that deliver double the floating point performance of the previous generation Mac Pro. Two workstation-class AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with up to 12GB of video memory provide up to 7TFLOPS of compute power and up to eight times the graphics performance of the previous generation Mac Pro. OpenGL and OpenCL are optimized in OS X Mavericks to leverage the full computing power of the Mac Pro CPU and dual GPUs. The new Mac Pro ships with OS X Mavericks. The all-new Mac Pro starts at $2999 and will be available in December.

The new Mac Pro features PCIe-based solid-state storage that delivers sequential read speeds up to 1.2GB/s. ECC DDR3 memory running at 1866MHz, with a four-channel memory controller, gives the new Mac Pro up to 60GB/s of memory bandwidth, twice that of the previous generation Mac Pro.

The new Mac Pro also features six Thunderbolt 2 ports, each with up to 20Gb/s of bandwidth per device. Thunderbolt 2 ports support up to six daisy-chained devices each, giving pros the ability to connect up to 36 high-performance peripherals – from external storage devices, to multiple PCI expansion chassis, to audio and video breakout boxes. Thunderbolt 2 uses existing copper or optical Thunderbolt cables and is completely backward compatible with existing Thunderbolt peripherals and cables, and also supports the latest 4K displays. A new self-configuring IP over Thunderbolt software feature in OS X Mavericks provides a fast link between Thunderbolt-enabled Macs.

The power and bandwidth of Mac Pro means users can seamlessly edit full-resolution 4K (3840*2160) video streams and play them in real time.

The all-new Mac Pro will be available in December through the Apple online store, Apple’s retail stores and select Apple authorized resellers. The Mac Pro is available with a 3.7GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E5 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9GHz, dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs with 2GB of VRAM each, 12GB of memory, and 256GB of PCIe-based flash storage starting at $2999; and with a 3.5GHz 6-core Intel Xeon E5 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9GHz, dual AMD FirePro D500 GPUs with 3GB of VRAM each, 16GB of memory, and 256GB of PCIe-based flash storage starting at $3999.

Configure-to-order options include faster 8-core or 12-core Intel Xeon E5 processors, AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of VRAM, up to 64GB of memory, and up to 1TB of PCIe-based flash storage.

Preview

Au contraire‎, before you criticise someone for not checking, you really should be sure of your own facts.

The entry level Mac Pro comes with dual D300 Firepro's which don't have a direct equivalent in the standard world of graphics cards.

Your claim they are a bit lowered W7000 is close, but they only have half the memory, 2GB instead of 4GB, and 20% less single precision performance.

So even if your claim of being equivalent to a W7000 at 1000Euros was relevant you could at best assert they are worth 800Euros.

However the W7000 can in fact be had for 650Euros, which using the same crude approximation above puts a D300's worth at about 500Euros, which really is being generous, so that put's your 2000Euros worth of graphics cards at least 1000Euros out.

I don't wish the Xbit comments section to degenerate into the normal internet slanging match, but facts are facts.

Preview

3.

Where can the pro user plug in their red rocket video PCI cards, and what is the total aggregate bandwith of all the TB ports on this MacPro, after all the PCI/display port protocol overhead is taken into account, including the TB tunneling protocol overhead. Can these individual TB ports be aggregated to act as one high bandwith link, and what is the thunderbolt bandwidth compaired to a full PCIe 3.0 x16 slot's bandwidth, on a motherboard. Does Apple even have PCI expansion boxes or certify any third party PCIe based expansion boxes for video card/GPU use?

Preview

TB is nowhere near PCIe 3.0, not even 1.0 I think but about the red rocket cards, according to this: http://www.tomshardware.c...deo-red-rocket,14584.html they doesn't seem to get bottlenecked, and the test happened in a TB 1.0
There are a couple of external adapters for PCIe cards and they work fine.

Preview

Thats fine for any TB based Red Rocket, for a TB based product that is made, great for laptop TB video encoding/decoding, but what about all the previous generation's Mac pro's red rocket PCIe only cards(that many still own)! so name and link to the adapter SKUs, and are these just red rocket TB enabled cards in a builtin TB box(new product), or are they red rocket PCIe TB expansion boxes, in which the old PCIe cards can be plugged into and continue to be used? Also what about using more than one, many Old mac pro users have more than one Red Rocket card, and TB 2.O did not increase the per port(1, or 2 Ports?) bandwidth, it went from 4 wires at 20 Gb total bidirectional, to 2 wires 20 Gb total bidirectional, and I do not think the 6 TB ports can be aggregated to act as one high bandwith link, and PCI 3.0 x16 speeds are what is needed for serious work, with more than one red camera! and other production related inputs!

Preview

There are a couple of external cases for PCIe short of expensive but if you use hardware like RED then they look cheap.
TB 1 was at 10Gbit/s while 2 doubled that, I don't know the details or how much signal loss it suffer from host to receiver.
I wonder if that you mentioned, to combine ports to work together is possible in software level.

Preview

Are these external cases offically certified to work with Apple hardware/OS. with certifed drivers! I have seen reports, of external expansion cases out there, but there were questions about these PCI cases working on Apple products, especially the boxes ability to be used for external GPUs! I am unsure if this applies to the legacy RedRocket cards, and these external cases/expansion PCI boxes? Thunderbolt 2 did not increase the total bandwidth per port, it just halved the number of wires per port, but the overall bandwith available per port remains the same 20 gigabits bidirectional per port, TB1 or TB2! There are single port TB controller chips and dual TB controller chips, the macbook air has a single, the macbook pro retina has the dual. I am assuming that the Mac Pro(new model) has 3 of the dual TB controllers for its 6 TB ports, but I am sure many of the old Mac Pro owners are very unhappy about the lack of a PCIe 3.0 full x16 expansion slot, as well as the other slots, that no longer have a home on the new Mac Pro.